TEXT & PHOTOS BY THE WEST 400 BLOCK ASSOCIATION For the second year in a row, 449 West 21st Street takes the title iof Best Outdoor Halloween Decorations, with their “Rat and Roach Motel.” Major points for thinking outside the box, 449! Giant roaches of varying sizes (between 3-5 feet long) crawl up and down the front of this home.

This well-thought-out, multi-themed display featured creepy, oversized vermin in a spooky 1980s motel equipped with neon lights and custom signage—and an enormous, animated rat caught in a trap blocking the front doors. Yikes! The exterminator and one of the roach-covered motel owners gives out candy.

With appropriate scale throughout, animation, and light, this display is very well done. Halloween classics like ghosts, monsters, skeletons, and spiders decorate brownstones up and down W. 21st and 22nd Streets in all sorts of amusing, entertaining, and creative ways, but nothing makes a New Yorker scream in terror more than roaches and rats!

Shout out to 461 West 21st Street (seen below), for a striking, dramatic, Instagram-worthy display that would make Alfred Hitchcock and Edgar Allen Poe proud. Not easy to be beautiful and creepy—a wonderful execution.

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